Olga offered to show me the ropes because she thought I was a "titbit" – as young girls who had not been long in the business were called – and she did not like to think of another girl being so lonely and isolated as she had been during her first weeks at the "Ice Palace," as she called the house.

Franz Lehár's operetta is the perfect titbit for a financial crisis, as it concerns the fiscal anxieties of a small European state whose entire GDP has ended up in a flighty young widow's jewellery drawer.

The sharks rushed for the splash, and in their haste ran into one another, and splashed with their tails till the water was all foam and they could see nothing, each thinking some other was swallowing the titbit.